Drug discovery data scientist

Key words: data sciences, computational biology, bioinformatics, drug discovery

Permanent position at Janssen in Beerse

Context

Within the Discovery Sciences group, which provides advanced technology support to drug discovery projects in Janssen, the Computational Sciences department is responsible for comprehensive analyses of high-dimensional datasets. The position will be opened on the Beerse campus, which is the largest R&D center for small molecules within the entire Janssen group, investing over 1 billion euros each year in R&D.

Activities cover the integration of information from the broadest possible spectrum of datasources (chemical structure, microscopy images and omics, …) to comprehensively infer biological activities of millions of chemical compounds, and to apply these predictions to inform projects. In addition, the team designs and supports the execution of the generation of high-dimensional datasets (from cytometry or various sequencing approaches) from patient-derived material. The team is also responsible for the use of these data for the identification of potential mechanisms of disease and targets of intervention and the subpopulations of patients these mechanisms apply to.

Job description

In the context of the latter task, the department is opening a permanent position for a drug discovery data scientist, who will focus on the analysis and interpretation of high-dimensional datasets to identify interventional strategies for neurological, cardiovascular and metabolic, infectious, immunological or oncological diseases. The candidate will be responsible for

· the translation of questions of disease experts in the therapeutic areas and wet lab colleagues, to a quantitative analysis formulation

· the design and execution of targeted analysis approaches to link processed molecular and cellular data at scale to pathophysiological processes or clinical outcome, to produce actionable conclusions and to inform decision making

· the development and internalization of rigorous state-of-the-art approaches for integrative data analysis, and build-out and leveraging of collaborations with leading academic and industrial scientific teams in life, computational and data sciences

· work with informatics and statistics colleagues to offer the resulting analysis and visualization solutions to the project teams

· contributing to the scientific weight of the department by authoring peer-reviewed papers and presenting at relevant conferences

Qualifications and skills

• PhD in Computational Biology or any related quantitative field with direct exposure to multidisciplinary biology or clinical context with ideally a few years of post-doctoral experience in an academic or industrial setting
• demonstrated experience with linking high-dimensional molecular data, to phenotypic or clinical outcomes in constellations that led to hypothesis driven experimental or clinical follow-up
• advanced programming and scripting skills that enable the development of functional prototypes
• excellent communication, reporting and team interaction skills, self-motivation, proactivity and the ability to work independently

If you are interested, please reply with the appropriate documentation to hceulema – at – its – dot – jnj – dot – com.